#NASA races to save Swift telescope from falling back to Earth with daring rescue mission.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — #NASA is racing to save an aging telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission.

The US$30 million salvage operation gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver.

NASA hired startup Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the Swift #Observatory to a higher orbit where it can continue hunting for some of the universe’s biggest explosions. A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once it takes off from an atoll in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands aboard an airplane-launched #Pegasus rocket. Liftoff could occur as early as Tuesday.

Scanning the cosmos since its launch in 2004, Swift has been sinking faster and faster because of recent intense solar activity. It needs to get to a higher, more stable orbit as soon as possible to survive.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope — also at risk — could be next.

Like Swift, Hubble is losing altitude as the sun erupts with one flare after another. Katalyst Space CEO Ghonhee Lee said his company’s next-generation robot, still in development, could save the day for the much bigger Hubble in a couple years.

Only China has attempted a mission like the upcoming one, successfully boosting a satellite into a higher graveyard orbit four years ago.

“This is the first American space robot to go up and do anything like this,” Lee told The Associated Press. “NASA has all these big senior observatories … all of them can benefit from a service like this. So what we’re proving with this mission is this is a new play in the playbook that’s available.”

It will take Katalyst’s autonomous spacecraft, named Link, about a month to rendezvous with Swift and catch it, and another couple months to raise its orbit from the current 224 miles (360 kilometres) to the desired 373 miles (600 kilometres).

The 1.6-ton (1.4-metric ton) gamma ray observatory must be above 185 miles (300 kilometres) for the rescue to work. It’s expected to reach that point of no return in October, according to the latest estimates.

Roughly the size of a small kitchen refrigerator with a 40-foot (12-metre) solar wingspan, Link sports three arms with a reach of just over 3 feet (1 metre). Each arm has two finger-like pinching grippers that resemble the hands of a Lego mini figure.

If all goes well, Swift could be back in business by September, according to Lee.

Worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Swift was never designed to be repaired, let alone retrieved by hands — human or otherwise. That’s what makes this so challenging, according to company officials, who stress there is no guarantee it will work.

NASA signed a contract with Katalyst last September with only two requests: It has to be a rush job, but please don’t make things worse. Nine months later, the company is ready to rumble.

“I have to be honest. No one thought it was going to be possible. No one thought we would get as far as we’ve already gotten today,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, NASA’s astrophysics director.

NASA has bought a little more time for Swift, turning off all scientific instruments to slow its descent. Observations ceased in February.

NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said it’s worth the effort.

“If we let Swift reenter, we would lose that telescope. We would lose a lot of capability,” she said. “We don’t currently have the budget to build another one to replace that.”

While everything cannot be saved in space, Swift is special, said Domagal-Goldman.

True to its name, Swift is designed to pivot quickly to capture late-breaking astronomical events such as gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. With more discoveries expected by the Webb Space Telescope and soon-to-launch Roman Space Telescope, Swift, if saved, would be busier than ever as “NASA’s first responder.”

Katalyst sees Swift as the jumping-off point for a new repair business in space. The company’s next-generation robotic rescuer, scheduled to fly next year, will tackle satellites as high as 22,300 miles (35,800 kilometres) up. Lee envisions hundreds of robots in orbit one day, not only fixing and hoisting satellites but also refueling them and building solar farms, data centres and other platforms.

Thirty-six-year-old Hubble, which received repeat servicing by spacewalking astronauts during the shuttle era, could follow in 2028 with a life-extending Katalyst boost.

“It’s a national treasure,” Fox said. “People love Hubble.”

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

A large, harmless asteroid will zip past Earth this weekend. NEW YORK — A large asteroid will zip past Earth this weekend, but don’t worry: It poses no danger.

The space rock — 1997 NC1 — makes its closest approach Saturday morning, coming within 1.6 million miles (2.6 million kilometres), according to the European Space Agency.

Discovered nearly three decades ago by an asteroid-tracking system in Hawaii, the asteroid is between 2,461 feet (0.75 kilometre) to 5,413 feet (1.65 kilometres) wide — roughly the size of two to four Empire State Buildings.

Skygazers with binoculars and small telescopes may be able to spot the asteroid as a small point of light passing harmlessly through the sky. It won’t greet Earth from such a distance again until 2133, according to NASA.

The last time an asteroid similar in size passed safely by Earth from an even closer distance was in 2022, when a space rock called 1994 PC1 made its approach.

NASA, ESA and other space agencies track the paths of asteroids and other space junk so they can keep Earth safe from any possible collisions. Last year, astronomers tracked a smaller asteroid resembling a spinning hockey puck and said there’s no chance of it hitting Earth or the moon.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Adithi Ramakrishnan, The Associated Press

#India said it plans to share its technology involving the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, the country’s most reliable rocket, to help speed up development of the local space industry.

The #researchers then used #NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm that the cold gas in the region was being sculpted by hot #plasma, or electrically charged gas, coming from the galactic center: “If the cold gas were in front of or behind the hot plasma, there wouldn’t be a strong correlation,” Gorski said. “While we did not directly detect the particles moving in the wind, we were able to deduce the direction and energy of the wind.”

There are two main reasons why the discovery of the wind’s presence was more than half a century in the making, ever since Sagittarius A* was first observed in the 1970s, according to Gorski. The first is that instruments have only now become advanced enough to see through the gas and dust that sits between Earth and the center of our galaxy. The other is that Sagittarius A* is in a quiet period, making the wind weaker and therefore much harder to spot. It’s common for supermassive black holes to alternate between active and quiet periods, depending on the supply of material surrounding them.

“Our result essentially says this black hole also has wind, so it’s not weird, and black hole #physics in general work as we expected,” Murchikova said. “But the wind was hard to find because it was so weak. Never before have we seen a weak wind from a black hole.”

Observations from supermassive black holes in other galaxies revealed extremely powerful jets, but those events are rare, Murchikova added. Most of the time, black holes are in a quiet state and just blow a small breeze, which is harder to spot because “no fireworks are coming out.”

The researchers now plan to expand the map of cold gas to a larger region to diagnose the full impact of the wind. The team also wants to make a “movie” of the gas approaching the black hole to observe how the clouds move and be able to estimate how much of the gas the black hole consumes.
A thrilling discovery

Much remains for researchers to discover about how supermassive black holes launch winds, though scientists think that it’s likely due to how the magnetic fields are being spun around the black hole as the gas goes around in its orbit, according to Dan Wilkins, a research assistant professor in the department of astronomy of Ohio State University. Wilkins was not involved with the study.

“Seeing evidence for black hole-driven winds in our own galaxy not only gives us a new avenue for understanding how these winds are driven, but shows that supermassive black holes are still able to launch a wind into their host galaxies even when they are not undergoing active phases of rapid growth,” he wrote in an email.

Jets and winds from black holes are textbook physics, and scientists have observed many supermassive black holes hurling them into space. It’s “thrilling” to have finally caught our own galaxy’s central black hole in the act, said Priyamvada Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, in an email. Natarajan also did not take part in the study.

“Sagittarius A* has long been the great frustration of galactic center astrophysics: close enough to study in exquisite detail, yet stubbornly quiet, apparently windless,” she said. “This paper dismantles that picture. This is what patient, deep observational astronomy looks like when it pays off.”

There are still many open questions, Natarajan added, but that’s as it should be for a discovery paper. “The authors have handed the community a new observable, and the follow up will be rich,” she said.

Yes, the universe’s expansion is still accelerating, #researchers say. Taking a fresh look at data involving a specific type of stellar explosion, a team of researchers says it has confirmed the long-accepted notion that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate - the very observation that led to the identification in the 1990s of an enigmatic cosmic force called dark energy.

The study’s results rebut research published last year that concluded that this cosmic expansion is no longer speeding up - a finding that had challenged the basic understanding of the universe.

“The universe is still accelerating,” said astrophysicist Brodie Popovic of the University of Southampton in England, one of the leaders of the study published this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“There’s still a lot we don’t know and are excited to learn, but we think we’re on the right track,” Popovic said.

The study’s findings, by a team that included two Nobel Prize recipients, were guided by observations in two different datasets of a type of stellar explosion called a Type Ia supernova in order to calculate vast cosmic distances. These supernovas cause the destruction of an object called a white dwarf, the dense remnant of a low- to intermediate-mass star at the end of its lifecycle.

This type of supernova has proven valuable in investigating the universe’s structure based on evidence that all of these explosions have roughly the same luminosity. Their observed brightness differs depending upon their distance from Earth - brighter when closer and fainter when farther - making them useful as cosmic mile markers.

By measuring the brightness of these supernovas as seen from Earth, scientists can gauge the universe’s expansion rate and the variation of that rate over time. Because of the time it takes for light to travel through space, looking at distant objects in the cosmos is like looking back in time.

The Big Bang event roughly 13.8 billion years ago initiated the universe, and it has been expanding ever since. Scientists in 1998 disclosed that this expansion is accelerating, with an invisible force called dark energy as the hypothesized reason.

The universe’s contents include ordinary matter - stars, planets, gas, dust and all the familiar stuff on Earth - as well as dark matter and dark energy. Ordinary matter represents an estimated 5% of the contents. Dark matter, which is known from its gravitational influences on galaxies and stars, makes up an estimated 27%. Dark energy makes up an estimated 68%.

The authors of the 2025 study, which was published in the same journal as the new study, concluded that dark energy is weakening and has stopped accelerating the universe’s expansion.

“Type Ia supernovae are the premier tool for measuring the expansion history of the universe, and provided the first evidence in 1998 that cosmic expansion is accelerating due to dark energy,” said astrophysicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, a co-author of the new study and a Nobel laureate in physics in 2011 for the co-discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

“Over the past decade, a group at Yonsei University has argued that supernova distances should be calibrated differently by accounting for the ages of the stars that eventually explode, and that this ‘age effect’ could substantially alter the evidence for acceleration. In our study, we found no evidence for the claimed ‘age effect’ in the largest calibrated supernova samples used by the cosmology community over the last decade,” Riess said.

Astrophysicist Young-Wook Lee of Yonsei University, located in Seoul, was one of the leaders of the 2025 study. Lee defended the findings of his team, and said the main arguments made by the researchers in the new study have “serious methodological flaws or lead to conclusions that are internally inconsistent by their own logic.”

The researchers in the new study expressed confidence in their methodology and their conclusions confirming acceleration.

The physical nature of dark energy remains unknown. Platforms such as the newly operational Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile and the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, due to be launched in August, may provide some insight.

“We’re hoping the new data we get from Vera Rubin and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us narrow down what dark energy really is,” Popovic said.

(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Sustained maneuver has a propulsion problem. As missions grow more mobile, contested and long-lived, propulsion should be judged across the full mission, not at launch.

For years, space architecture was treated mostly as a question of placement: where to put a spacecraft, and how reliably it could hold position. That framing is now too narrow. A growing number of missions need to reposition, retask, inspect, avoid threats, persist, support logistics or simply preserve options as the operating environment changes. The community is taking maneuver more seriously — and that shift is overdue.

House appropriators back $55.5 billion Space Force budget, omit reconciliation funds.
Draft defense bill funds Pentagon at requested discretionary levels but excludes $350 billion in proposed reconciliation spending, casting doubt on Golden Dome and other space programs

#WASHINGTON — #Satellite data provider Spire Global has partnered with one of Germany’s largest defense contractors to pursue space-based missile warning and hypersonic threat detection capabilities.

The companies announced a memorandum of understanding June 10 under which Spire and Diehl Defence will explore collaboration on satellite-based intelligence and early warning systems designed to detect ballistic and hypersonic missile threats.

The agreement does not include a contract award or financial terms, but it positions the companies to pursue future opportunities in Europe’s expanding space-security and missile-defense market.

Spire, which operates a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit, collects and analyzes radio-frequency signals, weather data, aircraft and maritime tracking information, and other forms of geospatial intelligence.

Spire’s chief executive Theresa Condor said the collaboration combines the company’s satellite and data capabilities with Diehl’s defense expertise to help strengthen security from space for Germany and Europe.

Diehl’s chief executive Helmut Rauch said the goal is to connect intelligence gathered from space-based systems with weapons platforms and military command-and-control networks.

The partnership comes as Europe accelerates efforts to develop sovereign missile-warning capabilities following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amid growing concerns over ballistic and hypersonic missile threats.

The United States operates extensive missile-warning satellite networks through programs managed by the U.S. Space Force. European nations have historically relied more heavily on U.S. capabilities but are now examining independent space-based sensing architectures as governments seek greater strategic autonomy in defense and intelligence.

Germany has emerged as a key participant in those discussions, creating potential opportunities for companies able to provide satellite-based surveillance and early warning services.

Detecting hypersonic missiles remains one of the most challenging missions for modern militaries. Unlike traditional ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons can maneuver during flight while traveling at speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound, making them more difficult to track and intercept.

The agreement builds on Spire’s investment in Germany. The company recently announced an expansion of its satellite manufacturing facility in Munich intended to support sovereign satellite missions.

#Amazon was relieved of a government deadline to have half of its planned satellite constellation up and running by next month, delaying the risk that regulators might suddenly curb the operation

#NASA astronauts returned to the International Space Station (ISS) after their preventive evacuation to the docked Dragon spacecraft over an air leak on the #ISS Russian segment, Roscosmos Deputy Head for Piloted Programs Sergey Krikalyov said.

"According to our information, the NASA astronauts have returned to the ISS to continue work in normal mode. Nothing endangers the crew’s safety. Earlier, the NASA crew was transferred to the docked Crew Dragon spacecraft for the time of repairs in a transfer chamber," the Roscosmos official said.

NASA Spokesperson Bethany Stevens said earlier on June 5 that NASA had ordered astronauts aboard the International Space Station to transfer to their docked Dragon spacecraft as a measure of precaution as the Russian crew was carrying out repairs on the Zvezda module after detecting new air leaks,

#Roscosmos announced on June 5 that cosmonauts had found two potential air leaks in the Zvezda module. The first leak was quickly sealed and work was underway to seal the other, it said.